Google Youtube app 500 errors

Shopify Apps

Topic summary

A merchant encountered 500 errors in Google Merchant Center causing product disapprovals, despite URLs loading correctly in browsers.

Root Cause Identified:

  • Cloudflare settings were blocking heavy traffic from single sources
  • Google’s crawlers were being treated as suspicious traffic and blocked

Resolution Process:

  • Simply disabling Cloudflare in their account did not resolve the issue
  • The problem persisted because Shopify’s infrastructure uses Cloudflare, which continued applying the original configuration
  • Solution: Completely removing the site from the Cloudflare account (not just disabling it) fixed the crawling issues

Status: Resolved. The merchant shared their solution to help others experiencing similar Google Merchant Center crawler blocking issues.

Summarized with AI on October 26. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Has anyone had issues with products being disapproved in the Google Merchant Center citing a 500 error even though the URLs work without issue when viewing in a browser?

We can’t see anything that might be causing it but just trying to understand if it’s a common issue and whether there’s a solution short of looking at an alternative app?

2

Maybe you have an IP blocking app for specific countries?

Is it all products, or just some?

Are the product issues increasing, staying the same, or decreasing?

3

We managed to find the cause, so posting the details here in case anyone else comes across the same issue.

We utilised Cloudflare for the store in order to assist with some tracking issues we were having, and the settings we had on there meant it was blocking heavy traffic from a single source, in this case, Google.

We disabled Cloudflare, but the problem persisted. After some research, we discovered that as Shopify uses Cloudflare for their infrastructure, even though we had disabled it within our own account, somehow it was still picking up our Cloudflare configuration and blocking the crawlers.

The end solution was to not just disable in Cloudflare, but remove the site from the account altogether. It then rectified itself.